Search form

Hans Lodder - Leap Frog Management Consultant's blog

Business processes are very important to an organization. Giving processes attention is therefore very worthwhile. But when do you need a Business Process Competence Center (BPCC)?

Knowledge about business processes can be seen as being part of the company assets. This is a good line of thinking. This capital management should be done by business management. Business management can decide to delegate business process management to other staff.

McKinsey has surveyed companies worldwide in several branches, asking those companies when they heard about the last strategic move of their competition. About half of the companies became aware of important competition changes after the new initiatives were already on the market!

The Netherlands get a new government. At last. Much time has been spent, and much energy has been wasted. In my perception it was 1 of the worst government creations ever. The question is what caused it, and how to improve this.

Today companies are still careful before they spend money. They are still seeking options to increase customer satisfaction as well as reducing costs. Good points who are worth it always to be considered carefully. I was asked to carry out a 'low hanging fruit assessment', and find some suggestions for process optimization. But where? And how?

Recently I watched a video of John Seddon. This is remarkable, because I never did this before. But John Seddon has something to say about quality and Systems Thinking, and I want to share his ideas with you.

The lean mindset lives! I get many questions on how to practice a lean mindset. An example might help!

Results2Match delivers a process optimizing service. Especially the website optimizing variant may be used as a vehicle to demonstrate lean mind set thinking. What is necessary to provide such a website optimizing service? And why makes a lean mindset a difference here?

Forrester Research has executed a web-site check on 6 Canadian banks. The results were very bad. The most common short comings were misplaced content and functionality, inefficient task flows, illegible text and poor use of space.

Sometime ago I wrote about my Drupal migration project. In one month time the traffic to that site is reduced from more than 3,000 per month to 2 per day. Google displays the home page in search results more than 1,000 times, but less than 10 persons click through to this page. What goes on? How to repair it?

In my last blog I advocated the 5Whys methodology as an approach to arrive at lean systems and to reduce complexity. Many of you considered this an abstract advice, and asked me whether I could give an example.

Steven van het Veld, a well-known Dutch independent principal (enterprise) information architect, claims that companies spend more on their website than on their enterprise architecture. This statement seems to be in line with something else I recently heard: Organizations spend much more on their website than on business process improvement, while the Return On Investment (ROI) of business process improvement is much higher.

Since about a year an old friend of mine is Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the Europa Fietsers (European Cycle Route Foundation). His largest asset, and problem child, is their website. Recently he asked my opinion on how to improve it.

This week I got a question from a reader regarding KPI's for a CIO at a Department of Defense. He wanted to know whether we could present KPI's to be fully accountable by the CIO. Now my Results2Match partner, Hans van Nes, once responded to a similar question of a reader: KPI's for a not-for-profit environment.

This week I was involved in a discussion regarding a business process performance improvement project. This projects objective is to improve the efficiency of a hospital polyclinic by reducing the number of No Show patients.

Recently I was asked to present my personal list of favorite management books. These quiet days between Christmas and New Year are extremely useful for reflections. So in this blog I proudly presents my thoughts on business requirements for a management book.

Ever been sitting in a hospital waiting room, watching how a patient is called up, and he is absent? The time and effort it takes before the receptionist believes the patient will not show up? I have! And now there is solution that solves this for once and for all.

You might think that No Shows are only a problem for the hospital staff. But did you know that only for the Netherlands the yearly cost are estimated to supersede the million EUR 175? That is serious money! Apart from cost there are more disadvantages:

My neighbor is a retired Corporate Operations Officer (COO) of a large American, worldwide operating financial services organization. Currently, he is reading the management book "De Prooi" ("The Prey"). This book describes how a CEO manages to break a bank with a history of 183 years, and originally established by King Willem I in 1824. It takes this CEO less than 9 years to complete the downfall of one of the top 3 of Dutch banks.